Thoughts Behind PATTERN OF ILLNESS°∆

Have you ever noticed that when you're paranoid, you perceive everyone to be looking at you, but in reality, they're ignoring you just as much as they normally do. The only thing that's different is you.

You could literally be on fire in the middle of Walmart screaming for help and I doubt many people would even stop to glance at you.

The same thing happens in behavioral health institutions. Most of their patients are "on fire", and the staff that they depend on, are walking around laughing and joking about their weekends and their normal lives while their charges suffer.

I decided to be a certified peer specialist not too long ago, but it's basically a couple levels below a caseworker. And because you are a peer, you can be honest about your mental health conditions in order to help those who have similar conditions. Lived experience is what is valued in that type of work. And I feel like I have an exorbitant amount of lived experience in this particular subject.

Sometimes I think I would be too negative to be a CPS, because I'm not the type of chick to lie to you. The honest to God truth is, is when you wake up at 3:30 in the morning and the weight of the world falls on your shoulders and you're horrified and you have anxiety, there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Nothing.

You can stay calm, and you can stay still. But that's all you can control. If you can control that you're doing good as a matter of fact.

I think we've all had some mind-bending situations that have happened to us after hours and have had to anxiously wait until morning to relieve ourselves of the emotional burden of the experience during waking hours, when people will listen.

You might say something like, I will never let this happen again, I will never be this afraid at the worst possible time, I'm going to do everything I can to prevent it. But as much as we would like to think we have control, some things attached to our humanity and individualism don't have control buttons.

There are no magic pills, there are no magic cocktails of pills that will put you back together the way you were before a mood disorder like bipolar ran through your life like a tornado. There will never be that time in your life again that post bipolar time. It can't exist.

Firstly because you know too much. You now know what is at stake when you start to feel bad. When you start to feel sad. When you begin to be unable to withstand people looking at you. You know what's coming.

That on its own, causes anxiety and dread in just about everyone who has a mood disorder (Not to mention their caretakers).

Most of it is fear of the next episode. Worrying about how bad it will be and what we might have done differently to change an outcome that doesn't have much to do with any of your actions or our thoughts; but similarly, has everything to do with both.

But sometimes I think that I might be focusing on the wrong things.

Although the outlook for bipolar disorder is not the most positive research initiative I've ever seen, there are a lot of things they could be doing that would differentiate those who have a tendency to malinger versus those of us who are seriously suffering. An MRI / CAT scan can easily show areas of the brain that have decreased or increased due to bipolar effects on your brain's gray matter.

That having been said, bipolar is an easily identifiable physiological condition that is not left up to a single man diagnosis anymore. They have tests for it. It's literally taking a picture, looking at that picture, comparing it to a healthy brain and seeing what parts of your amygdala or what other gray matter areas you've lost from oscillating back and forth between manic and depressive episodes.

It makes me so angry that some of this stuff is so easily diagnosed. It could be so easily fixed yet people wait years to get a diagnosis because doctors don't like being liable for having to do their jobs.

I don't know what kind of systemic change needs to come into fruition to make our medical system more efficient and worthy of our money and time. But at present, the American medical system is a horrible example of a well-managed, efficient system as well as an excellent example of greed, impropriety, blackmail, corporate cover-ups, manipulative companies and the worst type of leadership. The best marketing. But the worst type of people.

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